"Shabash!" he cried, as he dismounted. "May I never drink at the White Pond of the Prophet if that be not good hearing! So you have caught him, brethren! Wao, wao! you have done a great thing. He is not killed?--No? That is well, for he is sorely wanted at Lucknow. Tie him tightly, though. He is a fox in guile, and might give me the slip again. May his bones bleach in an infidel's grave!--I have hunted him fifty miles, yet scarce a man I met had seen him!" CHAPTER X WHEREIN FATE PLAYS TRICKS WITH MALCOLM If it is difficult for the present generation to understand the manners and ways of its immediate forbears, how much more difficult to ask it to appreciate the extraordinary features of the siege of Lucknow! Let the reader who knows London imagine some parish in the heart of the city barricading itself behind a mud wall against its neighbors: let him garrison this flimsy fortress with sixteen hundred and ninety-two combatants, of whom a large number were men of an inferior race and of doubtful loyalty to those for whom they were fighting, while scores of the Europeans were infirm pensioners: let him cram the rest of the available shelter with women and children: let him picture the network of narrow streets, tall houses and a few open spaces--often separated from the enemy only by the width of a lane--as being subjected to interminable bombardment at point-blank range, and he will have a clear notion of some, at least, of the conditions which obtained in Lucknow when that gloomy July 1st carried on the murderous work begun on the previous evening. The Residency itself was the only strong building in an enclosure seven hundred yards long and four hundred yards wide, though by no means so large in area as these figures suggest. The whole position was surrounded by an adobe wall and ditch, strengthened at intervals by a gate or a stouter embrasure for a gun. The other structures, such as the Banqueting Hall, which was converted into a hospital, the Treasury, the Brigade Mess, the Begum Kotee, the Barracks, and a few nondescript houses and offices, were utterly unsuited for defense against musketry alone. As to their capacity to resist artillery fire, that was a grim jest with the inmates, who dreaded the fallen masonry as much as the rebel shells. Even the Residency was forced to use its underground rooms for the protection of the greater part of the women and children, while the remaining buildings, except the Begum Kotee, which was comparatively sheltered on all sides, were so exposed to the enemy's guns that when some sort of clearance was made in October, four hundred and thirty-five cannon-balls were taken out of the Brigade Mess alone.